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I was like you when young. Cops, Judges, got the benefit of the doubt in my mind. I thought of Miranda as a useless trick used by trick attorneys to get bad guys off

I was there, now I generally support the idea of the Miranda. BTW, I know people do get mad at defense attornies but you got to remember, it is their job to represent the defendant and again, their job is to get them off or the lightest sentence as possible. As sometimes our system may not work the way we want it to, it is there to give a fair shake to the accused. I know some guilty goes free but I'd take that over having an innocent jailed. That's why I'm against the death penalty unless it is used for high treason and even then there should be a huge burden of proof. I know there are bad people, upon conviction in a fair court of law, who must be locked up, if it is just that, it is OK with me.

But times have changed. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Murrah Building really got me thinking about the responsibilities of the Government. Violence begets violence. Lawlessness by the government breeds violence of all kinds.

Yeah, sometimes I chalk it up to bad karma, do bad things, bad things happen back at you but as you put it, it is a vicious cycle. There are people who cannot take it anymore and who have no ties, either by circumstance or choice, along with the thought of "nothing left to lose" well, you get the idea. Again, my buddy in my last story, he installs breathilizers in cars, most of them court ordered by the State of West Virginia. BTW, I have no problem with that if it is court ordered as a method of rehabilitation but there are forces that want them in every car. I got into a huge debate over that with my high school teacher over that. She said, "if it saves one life." I like to save lives, but we must ask "is it Constitutional" as well as using logic and reason over knee-jerk emotion.

Getting back to my buddy, he is starting up the Weirton office, already he had 80 to 100 installs. I think tying in to what you said, there is a lot of dispair and hopelessness out there, I think more people are hitting the bottle or going to drugs so he's gonna be busy for a while.

The people will almost always choose safety over liberty and the politicians know how to sell bigger budgets, more regulations etc using this.

I know, as Mike Savage says, "the sheeple." Again, I think of my teacher in that debate.

So here we sit with NSA running roughshod over the Bill of Rights. It started with Law and Order conservatives demanding a “fix” from the government for just about any conceivable problem they could come up with.

Shame, isn't it? My father went to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. He had to go through the TSA checkpoint and got so angry, he just opened up his mouth and said, "well, I guess the terrorists have won." He almost got into trouble with the TSA on that, although he is right.

There is one side of me that thinks one day the Feds will be irrelevant. When, or how, I do not know. The NSA and internet is like a Tower of Babel in a way. Like the tower of Biblical times, it takes a lot of support for all of this. If something happens to the power grid, it will come down and stop eventally, perhaps after the diesel runs out at the NSA's generators, that is, if the internet is still up.